I’ve been neglecting this place. I haven’t even been announcing our games officially on the blog. (by the way, we stealthily released The Crazy Program on Android!)

For the past year or two I’ve been hacking away at HTML game demos on and off. Thinking about it, I never followed through and released something. For a time, I was thinking seriously about doing a Japanese styled mobile card game, similar to the now famous Puzzles & Dragons but I sort of hit a wall with my approach to using 3D with CSS. But that ended up just turning into a blog post outlining a CSS3 technique.

I decided to release this new project as early as possible and get something out the door, no matter how rough it was. Introducing…

RUSH-D (alpha)!

RUSH-D is a Sokay game series that never got quite off the ground. I started designing RUSH-D as a side-scrolling space shooter (SHMUP) fashioned after some of my favorite games — Einhander and UN Squadron. I created a simple Flash prototype while I was working on Thugjacker and in those days, that was enough to completely sidetrack me away from my main project.

Here’s a screen shot of RUSH-D (aka Sokay Rush) prototype.

Since this was back in the day (around 2003), I thought I was clever planning to use pre-rendered 3D art to wow all of the Flash game audience. My expectations grew and I never got really far with the project outside of a few design docs and concept art.

Anyway, for this demo I wanted an excuse to do something in WebGL. I’ve been working in HTML5 techs and felt it wouldn’t be too hard to develop something fairly simple that looked pretty cool. Since I was using the open-source javascript 3D engine three.js to code it, and the open-source Blender to create 3D models, I decided to try a fully open source approach for this project’s tools.

I modeled everything in Blender. Not bad once you get past the shit UI design.

I took a Typography class at Art Center in Pasadena last summer so I consider myself an amateur graphic designer now – haha! It actually reawakened my latent illustration abilities and even though I had to do a bunch of tedious assignments, I regained confidence in my drawing. I had fun designing a logo for the game using what I learned in the class.

Rush-D logo concepts

The final logo was created with Inkscape, an open-source Adobe Illustrator alternative. I love how it came out and I’m looking forward to keep pushing my design capabilities. I used to believe I could never do any kind of graphic design and believed it to be a waste of time. Years of working in web development and learning an eye for design has helped me to build an appreciation of it although I’d rather just draw people beating each other up.

Here are some concept sketches I used to pump myself up to do this project. I imagine how wonderful it would be and that motivates me to code. I think I got really close to my initial sketch.

I wanted to do some cinematic cut-scenes but that can wait till another day…

And here is the ‘final’ result.

First and foremost, this was meant as an example of Sokay’s ability to create games with WebGL and three.js. I also wanted to have fun with it and not burn myself out! Mission Complete! I still intend to work on this as I get time to — so close to blowing stuff up already! HAHA!

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Bryson is the guy behind all of the Sokay creations. Heading artwork and development, he's determined to make sure each game has a "distinctively Sokay" quality to them. He's always looking forward for a chance to experiment with new technologies to explore exciting ways to achieve fun.